SwampFox

The new Swamp Fox: Hopefully we'll blow your socks off!

Submitted by: John Warner on Oct 08, 2007 at 6:43 am Tagged with: Entrepreneurial, Featured Articles Source:

About a year ago, several of us began noodling over how to make Swamp Fox a much more powerful innovation tool. This Thursday, March 11th, you'll see the fruit of a lot of thought and hard work when we launch a significantly enhanced Swamp Fox website at the Carolina Connect 2007 conference in Asheville.

Here's our reason for being from now on.

Swamp Fox connects people with great ideas to others with access to expertise, resources or customers.

Rather than merely a listing of the news, the paradigm of Swamp Fox will become online portals of highly personalized information. Building on the online profiles created during the InnoVenture 2007 registration process, to participate in the Swamp Fox Community you will create a profile including your bio, your expertise that might help others, and what you're seeking in the community. You may be looking for all sorts of things, like technical innovations, specialized facilities, talent, business partners, or even customers. You'll be able to efficiently search others' profiles to find win/win relationships. There are about 700 personal profiles online already of those who attended InnoVenture 2007, and we expect that to grow considerably.

The news will continue to be a foundation of Swamp Fox, now only be better. By the end of the year, we will begin to serve up on the website and in the weekly email update news that is personalized to your online profile. We have about 10,000 email update subscribers, and rather than sending you all the news we have each week, we will begin to send you the news you most care about. We have an archive of about 11,000 announcements going back to 2000, and we'll be better able to help you find information useful to you.

Swamp Fox will continue to produce the InnoVenture conference. You can identify others with whom you have common interests through the website, and then build personal relationships at InnoVenture. Swamp Fox will also continue to maintain a calendar of other events. We're building stronger relationships with about 20 innovation and entrepreneurial organizations in South and North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, to help them promote their events, so you can stay plugged into what's going on across the southeast.

We also have a video archive of all the presentations from InnoVenture 2007. We have some additional video as well, such as interviews with exceptional entrepreneurs. All of the video will be available to you, once you have a personal profile online.

The Swamp Fox Community website is made possible by the sixteen initial 2008 Anchors that we will announce on Thursday as well. They are not just investors, but active participants in the community. These major businesses and universities will highlight the priorities they seek from the community for solutions to problems they have or customers with problems they have solved. For you, these Anchors are significant sources of expertise, resources and customer relationships if you can find ways to collaborate with them.

We've ideated; we've debated; we're finally here. This is like childbirth... (well the women reading this don't think that's even close)... but just the same, we have lots of anticipation about what you'll think of our new creation.

We'll crank up the new website shortly, but then it can take a few days for the new server's address to ripple throughout all the Internet's machinations. You should be able to check out the new site by the weekend, if not before. Then we hope you'll find it as cool, and more importantly as useful, as we do.